The CBP has determined that software products comply with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA)
when that software is manufactured in what is known as a "designated
country," even if the majority of its source code was created in a
non-designated country. [Disclosure: Talend is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Many software vendors -- whether they are open-source based or not -- will benefit from the ruling.

The
US TAA says that government agencies may acquire only products or
services produced in certain countries -- known as designated countries.
This has sometimes hampered the agencies from acquiring open-source
software if some of the code was developed outside of those countries,
even when the majority of production took place inside designated
countries.

“Country of origin” issues sometimes have
been used as a pretext to make a case against the procurement of
open-source software. Talend conducts the vast majority of its software
production in the U.S., France or Germany, but like many manufacturers,
it also seeks talent in countries that can fall outside those
considered designated countries

"With this finding, any other company that meets the same criteria can get the same approval," said Yves de Montcheuil, Vice President of Marketing at Talend. "And then government buying can meet the trade agreement status. The process can now be easily repeated."

While governments
around the world have been moving to embrace open source for a long
time, adoption has been slow and inconsistent in the U.S., though it is
steadily growing as more federal agencies revise their guidelines and
regulations, and some states pass laws requiring the consideration of
open-source options.

Useful guidance

"The
Talend Ruling is significant because government users now have useful
guidance specifically addressing open source software that is developed
and substantially transformed in a designated country, but also
includes, or is based upon, source code from a non-designated country,"
said Fern Lavallee, DLA Piper LLP, counsel to Talend. "The timing of
this ruling is right given the Department of Defense’s well publicized attention and commitment to Better Buying Power and DoD’s recent Open Systems Architecture initiative."

"This
is great news for everyone in the software industry," said Bertrand
Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend. "While the news is significant for
Talend and offers an opportunity for us to address needs in the federal
space, our belief is that many software vendors -- whether they are
open-source based or not -- will benefit from the ruling."

The
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is currently and significantly
revising the December 2011 draft of the “DoD Open Systems Architecture,
Contract Guidebook for Program Managers.” The guidance
document, expect by the end of 2012, helps DoD program managers use Open System Architecture principles for National
Security Systems. You may also be interested in:

Gardner:
Many organizations are
now focusing more on the user experience and the business benefits and
less on pure technology -- and for many, it's a challenge. From a very
high level, how do you perceive the best way to go about a cultural
shift, or an organizational shift, from a technology focus more toward
this end-user experience focus?

The CIO has to keep his eye forward to periodically change tracks,
ensuring that the customers are getting the best value for their money.

Naguib: There are several paradigms involved from the COO
and CFO’s push on innovation and efficiency. A lot of the tooling that
we use, a lot of the products we use, help to fully diversify and resolve
some of the challenges we have. That’s to keep change running.

The
CIO has to keep his eye forward to periodically change tracks, ensuring
that the customers are getting the best value for their money. That’s a
tall order and, he has to predict benefit, gauge value, maintain
integrity, socialize, and evolve the strategy of business ideas on how
technology should run.

We have to manage quite a few
challenges from the demand of operating a global franchise. Our COE
looks at various levels of optimization and one key target is customer
service, and factors that drive the value chain.

That’s
aligning DevOps to business, reducing data-center sprawl, validating
and making sense of vendors, products, and services, increasing the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) of emerging technologies, economy of scale, improving services and hybrid cloud
systems, as we isolate and identify the cascading impacts on systems.
These efforts help to derive value across the chain and eventually help
improve customer value.

Gardner: Paul Muller,
does this jibe with what you're seeing in the field? Do you see an
emphasis that’s more on this sort of process level, when it comes to IT
with of course more input from folks like the COO and the chief
financial officer?

Level of initiatives

Muller:
As I was listening to Abe's description I was thinking that you really
can tell the culture of an organization by the level of initiatives, and
thinking that it has. In fact, you can't change one without changing the
other. What I've just described is a very high level of cultural
maturity.

Paul Muller

We
do see it, but we see it in maybe 10 to 15 percent of organization that
have gone through the early stages of understanding the performance and
quality of applications, optimizing it for cost and performance, but
then moving through to the next stage, reevaluating the entire chain,
and looking to take a broader perspective with lots of user experience.
So it's not unique, but it's certainly used among the more mature in
terms of observational thinking.

Gardner: Tell us about AIG, its
breadth, and particularly the business requirements that your Global
Performance Architecture Group is tasked with meeting.

Naguib:AIG
is a leading international insurance organization, across 130
countries. AIG’s companies serving commercial, institutional, individual
customers, through one of the world’s most extensive property/casualty
networks, are leading providers of life insurance and retirement
services in the US.

Among the brand pillars that we
focused on are integrity, innovation, and market agility across the
variety of products that we offer, as well as customer service.

Bringing together our business-critical and strategic drivers across
IT’s various segments fosters alignment, agility, and eventually unity.

With AIG’s mantra of "better, faster, cheaper," my organization’s
people, strategy, and comprehensive tools help us to bridge these gaps
that a global firm faces today. There are many technology objectives
across different organizations that we align, and we utilize various HP solutions to drive our objectives, which is getting the various IT delivery pistons firing in the same direction and at the right time.
These include performance, application lifecycle management (ALM), and business service management (BSM), as well as project and portfolio management (PPM).
Over time our Global Performance organization has evolved, and our
senior manager realized our strategic benefit and capability to reduce
cost, risk, and mitigate production and risk.

Our role eventually moved out of quality assurance's QA’s functional testing area to focus on emphasizing application performance,
architecture design patterns, emerging technologies, infrastructure and
consolidation strategies, and risk mitigation, as well increasing ROI
and economy of scale. With the right people, process, and tools, our
organization enabled IT transparency and application tuning, reduced infrastructure
consumption, and accelerated resolution of any system performances in
dev and production.

The key is bringing together our
business-critical and strategic drivers across IT’s various segments
fosters alignment, agility, and eventually unity. Now, our leaders seek
our guidance to help tune IT at some degree of financial performance to
unlock optimal business value.

Culture of IT

Gardner:
Is that a pattern you're seeing, that the people in QA are in
the sense breaking out of just an application performance level and
moving more into what we could call IT performance level?

Naguib: In the last six or seven years, there's less focus
on just basic performance optimization. The focus is now on business
strategy impact on infrastructure CAPEX, and OPEX. Correlating business use cases to impact on infrastructure is the golden grail.

I always say that software drives the hardware.

Once
you start communicating to CIOs the impact of a system and the cost of
hosting, licensing, headcount, service sprawl, branding, and services
that depend on each other, we're more aligning DevOps with business.

Muller:
I just had a conversation not three weeks ago with a financial institution in another part of
the world. I asked who is responsible for your end-to-end business
process -- in this case I think it was mortgage origination -- and the
entire room looked at each other, laughed, and said "We don't know."

So
you've really got this massive gap in terms of not just IT process
maturity, but you also have business-process maturity, and it's very
challenging, in my experience, to have one without having the other.

Gardner:
I think we have to recognize too that most businesses now realize that
software is such an integral part of their business success. Being adept
at software, whether it's writing it, customizing it, implementation
and integration, or just overall lifecycle has become kind of the
lifeblood of business, not just an element of IT. Do you sense that,
Abe, that software is given more clout in your organization?

Naguib:
Absolutely Dana. I truly believe that. I've been kind of an internal
evangelist on this, but I always say that software drives the hardware.
Whether I communicate with the enterprise architects, the dev teams, the
infrastructure teams, software frankly does drive the hardware.

That's
really the key point here. If you start managing your root cost and
performance from a software perspective and then work your way out,
you’ve got the key to unlocking everything from efficiencies to
optimizing your ROI and to addressing TCO over time. It's all business
driven. Know your use cases. Know how it impacts your software, which
impacts your infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure

Gardner:
Just being productive for its own sake isn’t good enough in this economy. We
have to show real benefits, and you have to measure those benefits.
Maybe you have some way to translate how this actually does benefit your
customers. Any metrics of success you can share with us, Abe?

Naguib:
Yes, during our initial requirements-gathering phase with our business
leaders, we start defining appropriate test-modeling strategy, including
volumetrics, and managing and understanding the deployment pattern with
subscriber demographics and user roles. We start aligning DevOps
organizations with business targets which improves delivery
expectations, ROI, TCO, and capacity models.

The big transformation taking place right now is that our organization
is connecting different silos of IT delivery, in particular development,
quality, and operations.

Then, before
production, our Application Performance Engineering (APE) team
identifies weak spots to provide the production team with a reusable
script setting thresholds on exact hotspots in a system, so that
eventually in production, they can take appropriate productive measures.
Now, this is value add.

Muller:
As we’re seeing across the planet at the moment, there's a recognition
that to bring great software and information is really a function of
getting Layers 1 through 7 in the technology stack working, but it's also about getting Layer 8 working. Layer 8, in this case, is the people. Unfortunately, being technologists, we often forget about the people in this process.

What
Abe just described is a great representation of the importance of
getting not just a functional part of IT, in this case quality and
performance working well, but it's about recognizing the software will
one day be delivered to operational staff to internally monitor and
manage it in a production setting.

The big
transformation taking place right now is that our organization is
connecting different silos of IT delivery, in particular development,
quality, and operations, to help them accelerate the release of quality
applications, and to automate things like threshold setting, and
optimize monitoring of metrics ahead of time. Rather than discovering
that an application might fail to perform in a production setting, where
you've got users screaming at you, you get all of that work done ahead
of time.

Sharing and trust

You
create a culture of sharing and trust between development, quality, and
operations that frankly doesn’t exist in a lot of process where the
relationship between development and operations is pretty strained.

Gardner:
Abe, how do you measure this? We recognized the importance of the
metrics, but is there a new coin of the realm in terms of measurement?
How do you put this into a standardized format that you’re going to take
to your CFO and your COO and say here’s what's really happening?

Naguib:
That's a good question. Tying into what Paul was saying, nobody cared
about whether we improved performance by three seconds or two seconds.
You care at the front end, when you hear users grumbling. The bottom
line is how the application behaves, translating that into business
impact as well as IT impact.

Business impact is what
are the dollar values to make key use cases and transactions that don't
scale. Again, software drives the hardware. If an application consumes
more hardware, the hardware is cheap now-a-days, but licenses aren’t.
You have database and you have middleware products running in that
environment, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud.

The
point is that impact should be measured, and that's how we started
communicating results through our organization. That's when we started
seeing C-level officers tuning in and realizing the impact of
performance of both to the bottom line, even to the top line.

We were able to leverage consistent dashboards across different IT
solutions internally, then target weak spots and help drive optimization.

Our role is to provide more insight earlier and quicker to the right people at the right time.
Leveraging
HP’s partnership and solutions helped us to address technologies,
whether Web 2.0, client-server, legacy systems, Web, cloud-based, or
hybrid models. We were able to leverage consistent dashboards across
different IT solutions internally, then target weak spots and help drive
optimization, whether on premise or cloud.

Muller:
In the enterprise today, it's all about getting your ideas out of your
head and making them a reality. As Abe just described, most of the best
ideas today that are on their way into business processes you can
ultimately turn into software. So success is really all about having the
best applications and information possible.

Understand maturity

The
challenge is understanding how the technology, the business process and
the benefits come together and then orchestrating that the delivery of
that benefit to your organization. It's not something that can be done
without a deliberate focus on process. Again, the challenge is always
understanding your organization's maturity, not just from an IT
standpoint, but importantly from a broader standpoint.

Naguib:
What's the common driver for all? Money talks. Translating things into a
dollar value started to bring groups together to understand what we can
do better to improve our process.

What we're seeing more is that it's not just internal dev and ops
that we're aligning with, or even our business service level
expectations. It's also partnerships with key vendors that have opened
up the roadmap to align our technologies, requirements, and our
challenges into those solutions.
The gains we make are
simple. They can be boiled down into three key benefits: savings,
performance, and business agility. Leveraging HP's ALM
solutions helps us drive IT and business transformation and unlock
resources and efficiencies. That helps streamline delivery and an
increased reliability of our mission critical systems.

After we've dealt with tuning, we can help activate post-production
monitoring using the same script, understanding where the weak spots
are.

My favorite has always been HP's LoadRunner Performance Center.
It’s basically our Swiss Army Knife to support diverse platform
technologies and align business use cases to the impact on IT and
infrastructure via SiteScope, HP SiteScope.

We're able
to deep dive into the diagnostics, if needed. And the best part is,
after we've dealt with tuning, we can help activate post-production
monitoring using the same script, understanding where the weak spots
are.

So the tools are there. The best part is integrated, and actually work together very well.

Muller:
One of the questions I get a lot from organizations is how we measure
and reflect the benefit. What hard data have you managed to get?

Three-month study

Naguib:IDC
came in and did an extensive three-month study, and it was interesting
what they have found. We've realized a saving of more than $11 million
annually for the past five years by increasing our economy of scale.
Scale on a system allows more applications on the same host.

It's
an efficiency from both hardware and software. They also found that our
using solutions from HP increased staff productivity by over $300,000 a
year. Instead of fighting fires, we're actually now focusing on
innovation, and improving business reliability by over $600,000 a year.

So
all that together shows a recoup, a five-year ROI, about 577 percent. I
was very excited about that study. They also showed that we resolved
mean time resolution over 70 percent through production debugging, root
cause, and resolution efforts.

So what we found, and
technologists would agree with me, is that today, with hardware being
cheaper than software, there is a hidden cost associated with hosting an
application. The bottom line, if we don’t test and tune our
applications holistically, either the architecture, code,
infrastructure, and shared services, these performance issues can
quickly degrade quality of service, uptime, and eventually IT value.

I have a saying, which is that quality costs money but bad quality costs more.

Gardner:
Abe, any recommendations that you might have for other organizations
that are thinking of moving in this direction and that want to get more
mature, as Paul would say. What are some good things to keep in mind as
you start down this path?

Naguib: Besides
software drives the hardware -- and I can't stress that enough -- are
all the ways to understand business impact and translate whatever you're
testing into the business model.

What happens to the
scenarios such as outages? What happens when things are delayed? What is
the impact on business operability, productivity, liability, customer
branding. There are so many details that stem from performance. We used
to be dealing with the "Google factor" of two-second response time, but
now, we're getting more like millisecond response, because there are so
many interdependencies between our systems and services.

Another
fact is that a lot of products come into our doors on a daily basis.
Modern technologies come in with a lot of promises and a lot of
commitments.

Identify what works

So
it's being able to weed through the chaff, identify what works, how the
interdependencies work, and then, being able to partner with vendors of
those solutions and services. Having tools that add transparency into
their products and align with our environment helps bring things
together more. Treating IT like a business by translating the impact
into dollar value, helps to get lined up and responsive.

Muller: It might
be a little controversial here, but the first step for progress on all of this is look in the mirror
and understand your organization and its level of maturity. You really
need to assess that very self-critically before you start. Otherwise,
you're going to burn a lot of capital, a lot of time, and a lot of
credibility trying to make a change to an organization from state A to
state B. If you don’t understand the level of maturity of your present
state before you start working on the desired state, you can waste a lot
of time and money. It's best to look in the mirror.

The
second step is to make sure that, before you even begin that process,
you create that alignment and that desired state in the construct of the
business. Make sure that your maturity aligns to the business's
maturity and their goal. I just described the ability to measure the
business impact in terms of revenue of IT services. Many companies can’t
even do something as fundamental as that. It can be really hard to
drive alignment, unless you’ve got business-IT alignment ahead of time.

I
have said this so many times. The technology is a manageable problem,
Layers 1 through 7, including management software to a certain degree,
have solved problems the most time. Solving the problem of Layer 8 is
tough. You can reboot the server, but you can’t reboot a person.

Solving the problem of Layer 8 is tough. You can reboot the server, but you can’t reboot a person.

I
always recommend bringing along some sort of management of
organizational change function. In our case, we actually have a number
of trained organizational psychologists working for us who understand
what it takes to get several hundred, sometimes several thousand, people
to change the way they behave, and that’s really important. You’ve got
to bring the people along with it.

Gardner: I'd like to thank our supporter for this series, HP Software, and
remind our audience to carry on the dialogue with Paul Muller through
the Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn, and also to follow Raf on
his popular blog, Following the White Rabbit.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The modern class of C and C++ tools are workhorses of PC applications development. And Objective-C tools have proven the rapid application development means of choice for native mobile development for iOS and Mac OS X.

So wouldn't it be nice to let the developers with the skills and proficiency in building native applications for the prominent enterprise computing clients of yesteryear (like Windows) gain ease in bringing better apps to all the mobile and fat client types demanded for the foreseeable future?

And now is when it really counts, with the advent of Windows 8, growing Mac OS X use and exploding sales of iOS and Android clients.

And now is when it really counts, with the advent of Windows 8, growing Mac OS X use and exploding sales of iOS and Android clients.

Embarcadero on Monday made generally availableC++Builder XE3, which allows a common development effort to natively target -- using a new 64-bit compiler -- Windows 8, Mac OS X and Intel (not yet ARM) clients. And coming this summer, the same compiler outputs to run those same apps natively on iOS and Android mobile clients. ARM support comes at end of 2013.

What's more, more of the Embarcadero stable of tools and IDEs will leverage the architecture. So more tools to build more apps once that run on more devices natively. The compiler architecture is extensible to make more tools that make more code more extensible to more platforms. Almost rhymes.

Vision to close chasms

The vision to bridge the long-standing chasm between mobile and full client environments -- never mind the Windows-Mac chasm -- came as Embarcadero acquired the CodeGear technology set from Borland back in 2008. Embarcadero said it immediately set out to build C++Builder XE3 then, to allow one code effort for many more targets.
"The old way of supporting multiple platforms was not practical," said Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Embarcadero in San Francisco. That old way included highly redundant and costly development to target different platforms. The old way forced ISVs and enterprises to make guesses about which clients to target, despite an extremely dynamic market and fast-changing users preferences.

"We needed to re-organize for a multi-client world," said Swindell. He said that ISVs and developers can hedge their bets by using C++Builder XE3 now, with the knowledge the same code will be able to quickly tuned and deployed in Q3 of this year on iOS and Android.

And there are some additional synergies that should appeal to the commercial ISVs.

The common mantra behind Delphi and C++ Builder, as well as any RADIDE, of course, is to make less code to more work fast. C++Builder XE3 takes that a big step further by applying Embarcadero's agile benefits to a common architecture supporting the major IDEs to deliver cross-client platform development on all the major targets. Full Delphi support on the new C++Builder XE3 underlying architecture comes this spring, with all the Delphi database connectivity and web services support built in.

And there are some additional synergies that should appeal to the commercial ISVs. The C++Builder XE3 architecture is already "app store ready," enabling ease in bringing the apps to Apple and Google app stores. But for enterprises, Embarcadero is also developing synergies between its AppWave capabilities and C++Builder XE3 so that enterprises too can gain a streamlined means to deploy the apps for PCs, Macs and iOS and Android uses from an AppWave app store. Expect that in the fall, said Swindell.

So the net-net on this from my perspective is that Embarcadero has primed the pump for accelerated enterprise mobile development for 2013. And, it's given developers with C and C++ skills the means to build and deploy via app stores mobile apps on-demand, via subscription models, even inside enterprises. It also means that apps can be designed with common logic and requirements and then delivered on multiple devices, so workforces can use those apps anywhere, anytime. Very powerful.

Best of mobile to enterprise

In essence, this brings what we have come to like about consumer and entrainment and web apps -- but to the workplace on all relevant platforms natively -- in a way that's not too complicated, costly or time-consuming.

I'm not seeing that in any comprehensive way from Microsoft, Apple or Google, nor from any PaaS development offerings in the market.

I would expect that PaaS-hungry providers may look to OEM or otherwise
license the C++Builder XE3 technology to bring to a cloud deployment
model.

And so I would expect that PaaS-hungry providers may look to OEM or otherwise license the C++Builder XE3 technology to bring to a cloud deployment model, and to better cross the PC-Mac divide, and to consolidate new apps development for all uses.

The C and C++ IDE tools and C++Builder XE3 technology, incidentally, need not only run on-premises. Embarcadero is exploring the means to make it all cloud-based, and to make tool clients using HTML5. A hybrid future for such multi-device development can't be too far off.You may also be interested in:

It's no surprise that most enterprises are now taking big data more seriously. But what might raise an eyebrow is how many organizations say they rely on real-time
processing of big data to fuel their business, as well as the number of
companies who say they're thinking about taking their big data to the cloud.

These findings come from a recent survey conducted by GigaSpaces,
which asked 243 IT executives in various industries about their big
data perceptions and plans. GigaSpaces, a provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed application environments and an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) stack for cloud deployment, conducted the survey online during the fall of 2012.

The first finding shows that enterprises are moving beyond collecting and storing big data and delving deeper.

Among the survey findings:

Some 80 percent of respondents said that big-data processing is a mission-critical function

More than 70 percent said their business requires processing of big
data in fast -- in real time -- either in large volumes, at high velocity, or
both

Only 20 percent of respondents said they have no plans to move their
big data to the cloud, indicating a widespread readiness to consider
the option

The first finding shows that enterprises are moving beyond
collecting and storing big data and delving deeper. Their businesses
require that they process this data in real time as events occur, be
they trades on a stock exchange, alerts from security monitors, or
location changes from GPS devices.

The second finding demonstrates the need for low latency
and high performance in processing big data streams, as these functions
are becoming mission critical and delays or dropped data can't be
tolerated.

Real-time tools

GigaSpaces, which sponsored the survey,
also asked survey respondents what tools they're using to process big
data in real time, and here's where a gap is revealed: only 12 percent
have adopted real-time event processing tools. According to GigaSpaces,
this suggests that most enterprises still have not found the right
solution that offers the ability to handle massive data while also
providing the required speed.

"Most enterprises haven’t yet adopted these real-time event processing tools, they're managing instead with a combination of a NoSQL data store with a Hadoop processing
platform," says Tsipi Erann, marketing communications manager at
GigaSpaces. "It's clear that enterprises haven’t yet found the right
solution that’s dedicated to real-time processing and also fits into
their architecture."

As for moving big data to the
cloud, survey respondents seem eager to reap the cost-savings and
improved agility offered by this model. Only 20 percent of them said
they have no plans to move big data applications to the cloud, while 44
percent have concrete plans or have already started this migration.

Among the 34 percent who said they were unsure about cloud deployments, primary concerns cited
were scalability and security.

It's clear that enterprises haven’t yet found the right solution that’s
dedicated to real-time processing and also fits into their architecture.

GigaSpaces cross-referenced answers to the
question of big data's business importance with answers to the cloud
question and came up with this statement: 80 percent of respondents who
define their big data applications as mission critical to the business
are planning or considering a move to the cloud. The company said it
will use findings from this survey to help shape the direction of its
offerings.

"We understand the importance of giving
customers the right features and will use the input in the creation of
such a solution, whether it’s integration with Hadoop or processing or
transactional management," says Yaron Parasol, product manager at
GigaSpaces.

(BriefingsDirect
contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research
on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn.)You may also be interested in: